Our English Center has been in use for almost 10 years, ever since we moved our materials from a musty shelter to a brightly-lit and newly-furnished room.
The whole team was involved in creating the materials, organizing, etc. During the first few years a teacher from the staff looked after the Center as part of her job, doing both housekeeping and preparation of new materials. Since the big budget cuts, we have been struggling to do it on our own, dividing up the work among us and doing it mainly in our free time.
Apart from serving the English staff as a resource center, a venue for meetings and an archive for exams, the Center is a prized location for classroom study of a different nature. We try to make it an inviting and cheerful place, and some of our staff have been posting intriguing and interesting posters and items on the boards at the entrance to the center. The boards inside the Center are used for seasonal or topical exhibits or for display of students' work, including creative book reports and performance tasks.
But the main emphasis is on using the Center for independent learning during English lessons. Every class has an opportunity to come to study at the center once every two weeks, and it is mostly used for individual or pair work. The tasks and work pages in the Center tend to be different from those in the textbooks, limited in scope (to be completed within one lesson) and include easy-to-follow instructions. This way, the teacher becomes a facilitator and lets the students take charge of their learning.
The system enables the students to choose an activity and then monitor and check their own work. Most of the tasks appear on pages that are organized in drawers according to level (easy – intermediate – challenging).
Some of the sections are: Cloze, Vocabulary, Grammar, Reading Comprehension, Writing, Puzzles and Interactive activities. There is also a magazine corner with a selection of tasks following the reading of an article or analyzing an ad. A special corner was created with taped songs accompanied by activities. (This section is going through changes at the moment.) The computer corner includes three computers and a folder of activities.
For the Center lessons, each student is given a document file and has at his disposal blank pages and dictionaries. At the end of every activity, the students organize the materials and record their work. They either mark their work using the answer keys, or leave it in a separate plastic sleeve for their teacher to mark it (e.g. writing assignments). Teachers check the files periodically and add the Center grade to the other grades of the semester.
The Center equipment includes tape recorders, a TV and VCR, and the Center is also used to show movies (video or DVD) on a large screen.
Our students enjoy working in the Center and we find less need for discipline during our lessons there. As a special bonus we sometimes ask students to create materials and activities for the Center, with surprising and wonderful results.
Submitted by: Gabi gabir@shiller.org.il
For more information on this wonderful learning center, click here:
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